Security and privacy of data-in-transit are critical issues in Industry 4.0, which are further amplified by the use of faster communication technologies such as 6G. Along with security issues, computation and communication costs, as well as data confidentiality, must be also accommodated. In this article, we design a cybertwin-based cloud-centric network architecture to improve the flexibility and scalability of 6G industrial networks. Cybertwin not only enables the deployment of advanced security solutions but also provides an always-on connection. However, the security of data-in-transit over wireless communication between users/things and cybertwin remains a concern. Hence, a privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on digital signature and authenticated key exchange protocol is designed to address the security concerns of data exchanged. In addition, we conduct a security analysis that proves that the scheme resists several attacks in the Industry 4.0 environment. Moreover, the evaluation performed confirmed the superiority of the proposed work comparing to the existing works.

Computation offloading manages resource-intensive and mobile collaborative applications (MCA) on mobile devices where much processing is replicated with multiple users in the same environment. In this article, we propose a novel hybrid multicast-based task execution framework for multi-access edge computing (MEC), where a crowd of mobile devices at the network edge leverage network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) collaboration for wireless distributed computing (MDC) and outcome sharing. The framework is socially aware in order to build effective D2D links. A key objective of this framework is to achieve an energy-efficient task assignment policy for mobile users. Specifically, we first introduce the socially aware hybrid computation offloading (SAHCO) system model, which combines of MEC offloading and D2D offloading in detail. Then, we formulate the energy-efficient task assignment problem by taking into account the necessary constraints. We next propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search based algorithm, named, TA-MCTS for the task assignment problem. Simulation results show that compared to four alternative benchmark solutions in literature, our proposal can reduce energy consumption up to 45.37 percent.

An important characteristic in trust management frameworks is how nodes obtain information about the trustworthiness of other nodes. Some trust management models are based on local information, while others use both information of neighbors and remote nodes. Despite the wide of information used, the existing trust monitoring approaches are mainly based either on passive monitoring mechanisms or on active monitoring mechanisms. While passive monitoring suffers from limitations ranging from strict antenna requirements to high battery use, active dissemination alternatives generate extra overhead to the resource constrained mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this paper, we propose a new knowledge monitoring scheme for trust management on MANETs based on autonomic principles. The proposed scheme minimizes the overhead using transiting packets on the network to update nodes knowledge about other nodes trustworthiness. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism improves significantly the performance of underlying network, providing a sufficient correct knowledge about nodes trustworthiness required by trust management frameworks.

ADMA represents an Autonomous Decentralized Management Architecture designed to provide Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) with autonomic principles. It allows the network to configure and reconfigure itself under environment changes without any human intervention. Our solution operates in a peer-to-peer manner and does not require any centralized entity to perform network management functions. Each mobile node implementing ADMA components is able to take the appropriate decision based on predefined high level policies and collected monitoring information. We present in this paper the basic components of an ADMA node. Then, we provide a simple self-configuring case study of our design considering Voice over IP (VoIP) as a test application. Simulation results show an improvement of the VoIP delay and loss rate while applying predefined policies.